Last week on a rainy and windy Thursday, I went along with comic writer Andy Diggle (The Losers, Batman, Green Arrow, 200oAD, loads more) to the BBC on Oxford Road, here in Manchester. Andy had been asked by Higher Futures 4U to go along as one of the creative professionals to chat to the kids about different career paths open to them. They wanted an artist to go along too so I was asked, and gladly went along to aid Andy in a short comics workshop. There’s more details of the event on the Higher Future’s 4U blog, where it actually refers to us as experts!

Here are some photos from the day taken by HF4U photographer Sam (copyright Higher Futures 4U):

Andy began by talking about how he first got into comics, how he started writing, what he’s worked on and the process of writing a comic.

I followed by saying how I started drawing at a young age, copying Garfield and the Thundercats logo, and then I demonstrated how you can guess famous characters from just a couple of lines. An exercise I learned from the excellent comic artist and teacher Jim Medway, while assisting him with his classes. I’m finishing off Bart Simpson and Spongebob Squarepants here at the request of some of the kids.

We ended each 15-20 minute session with some questions which were all great. I remember being stumped by “What happens if you forget how to draw something?” and “Can you draw a horse?”.

We could only chat to the kids and hope that our enthusiasm and example showed them that you can do you the things you love for a living when you grow up. It was hard to gauge if the kids were actually inspired on the day but from the photo above it looks to me like they enjoyed it.

Thanks to Andy for bringing me along, and a big thanks to Ana at HF4U for having us and for the big box of proper posh Thornton’s chocolates we got at the end.

I’d like to do more of this kind of thing, it’s kind of daunting but highly enjoyable.

Tags: Andy Diggle, BBC, Higher Futures 4U

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under comics, news. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.